Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Search leader Google, mindful of growing criticism concerning the amount of private data it collects about individuals on the web, has announced a change to its data retention policy concerning cookies. However, for most web surfers, the policy change will mean no change at all.
Every user of a Google service, whether it's
search, gmail, gnews, google maps or others, gets cookies embedded on
their disk that enables Google to track future and past visits. It has
previously been Google's policy to keep these cookies active virtually
indefinitely - or at least for decades.
Under pressure from privacy advocates, however, Google has announced a
change to its cookie retention policy which will mean that Google will
now only keep the cookies active for two years after they will expire
and be deleted. The catch is, however, that Google will automatically
renew the cookies each time a user accesses a Google service. A user
would have to not use a Google service for two years to get their
cookies deleted.
Since most web surfers use at least some Google services, given Google
is the big Kahuna of search and and has a growing list of Web 2.0
services, the effect will be that Google will still maintain exactly
the same amount of private data on its users for an indefinite period.
In effect, the change in policy may have some PR value for Google and
enable the company to claim that it addressing the concerns of the EU
and other privacy advocates. However, Google has merely changed the
rules to suit itself and the policy change will have no tangible impact
on the level and extent of data intelligence the search company retains
on its user base.
Whether the cosmetic change to Google's cookies policy will impress
privacy regulators and advocates remains to be seen. However, a betting
person would have to say that Google will have to come up with
something better than this to appease its detractors.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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